The opening poem paints the portrait of a young woman, a “girl … in love with love.” While the poems may not be intentionally linked, the verses in Blissful Blues capture the end of a romantic relationship, with that theme touched on with enough frequency to create a developed story. Verses talk about exams and university as well as roommates and family, providing a setting, conflict, and characterization.

Madan captures a range of emotions in her poems. At first, they convey longing and sadness, then they exude relief and joy at moving past the breakup. Poems also cover occasional backsliding, sometimes into doubt and anger, sometimes back into love after seeing the object of her affection again.

Verses capture the fragility of resumed life after a breakup and the uncertainty of being single; they are universally sympathetic. While some poems veer into expressing unhealthy codependency, the joy of the collection is that its poems work toward a healthier truth. In the end, the narrator is her own best friend, moving on and discovering herself.

Blissful Blues isn’t only about star-crossed love. Other poems express happiness at having supportive roommates and a loving family. In one poem, Madan captures a street scene in Delhi; in another, she discusses racial prejudice. One powerful poem explores what it’s like to have a final visit with a friend in the hospital. Such poems lend the collection greater depth and a sense of a coherent world view.

From a technical standpoint, poems play with a variety of rhyme schemes. They evince a talent for unusually paired rhymes, as with the connection of “integral” to “lethal.” In parts of the collection, rhyming is entirely disregarded, exchanged for interesting breaks in verses and even the plain prose of microfiction.

Blissful Blues is a youthful, playful collection that works through a failed romance, moving into the mature discovery of the greatest kind of love—of one’s self. Such movements of self-realization put the bliss into Blissful Blues.

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